Ambient Telepresence: Colleague Awareness in Smart Environments

Ambient Telepresence is a method to support informal awareness in distributed collaborative work, and to promote a sense of presence of people who are in fact not co-located. In this approach, everyday things that people use are augmented with awareness technology, creating a smart environment in which information on background activity can be collected and interpreted. This information is transmitted to remote sites, where it is rendered for peripheral awareness, using ambient media. The approach is demonstrated with the MediaCup environment, in which coffee cups are augmented with sensor, processing, and communication to obtain some basic cues on what people do.